Over the last year the United Kingdom has been criticized by many for its failure to live up to the recycling and waste management goals laid out by the European Union. This led to widespread government schemes which aimed to get people to recycled more and waste less. The government put pressure on local councils to come up with new and innovative ways to get their citizens to recycle. Because of this the recycling rates in the UK have gone up dramatically over the last year as people become increasingly more aware of the importance of diverting waste from landfills. Now that the overall recycling rates are up the United Kingdom has begun to look at specific areas of recycling where it is still failing to reach its goals.
According to statistics published by the European Container Glass Federation the United Kingdom was well below the European average when it came to the recycling of glass packaging. Some in the United Kingdom say that the numbers were a bit distorted as Belgium and Sweden both had one hundred percent recycling rates for glass, which somewhat skewed the numbers. The United Kingdom was ranked twelfth out of twenty seven European Nations, so even though it has a lot of work to do the UK is not as far off the average as the numbers might indicate.
Overall the UK has improved on its glass recycling at a faster rate than the European average. Between 2007 and 2008 the recycling rates increased around four percent in the UK while the average for Europe was only two percent.
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